by Lisa Gitlin
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Dr. Bobb clucked, shaking his head. “This is bad.”
“Well, he is kind of my friend,” I said. “He lives right on my floor, so we’ve become friendly. But I never encouraged Nicky to get together with him. It was a total accident. Nicky came to visit one day and Jerome was there and he started flirting with him, and it was like a fluff ball being sucked up into a tornado. What was I supposed to do?”
“You pull the fluff ball out of the tornado. Like this.” Dr. Bobb grabbed his top, sent it into the air, and then grabbed it and slammed it back into the base. I’m surprised the thing didn’t break. “Sometimes you have to push against gravity,” he said. He got up out of his chair. “Now get the hell out of here,” he said. “Both of you. I want to see you back here on Monday, Joanna.”
“What about Nicky?” I said. “All I did was answer the phone when Terri called. Nicky is actually in a relationship with a destructive force.”
“Nicky has his own therapist,” Dr. Bobb said. He looked at Nicky. “Am I right?” he said. “Aren’t you seeing my colleague, Dr. Jordan?”
“No, I am not,” Nicky said. “I quit him after two sessions. Dr. Jordan has the I.Q. of a fish.”
“Nicky!” Dr. Bobb said. “You need to be seeing someone! I know what you mean about Dr. Jordan. I will refer you do someone else.” He started writing on a piece of paper.
“Why can’t he see you?” I asked Dr. Bobb.
“Because we are friends, like you and Kimba,” Dr. Bobb said. “You cannot see your friend in therapy.” He smiled at Nicky and Nicky smiled back, the way they had in the hospital the first time they met. I never saw anything like it. They were besotted with each other. I wanted to make a funny comment, but I was speechless. Together they constitute a force that defies commentary.
When I got home, I realized I hadn’t really thought about Terri since I walked into Dr. Bobb’s office. Dr. Bobb and Nicky had cleverly distracted me from her. But not thinking about her isn’t the same as not feeling her. I’m still hovering nauseously in the air. And Bob Bobb can talk all he wants about defying gravity, but it’s kind of hard to slam yourself down into your base.
February 2001
This house is turning into a slum.
The respectable people have moved out and street people moved in. Courtly Tomas moved back to Brazil and two baggy-pants thugs moved into his room with a girl that I can tell is a crackhead. The two thugs have already come into my place, pretending to introduce themselves as my new neighbors, but they were just casing my room and now I need to get a double lock. The three of them hang out in Jerome’s room with that horrid Calliope and I hear them all shrieking “motherfucker” this and “motherfucker” that except for Jerome, who doesn’t curse. Meanwhile Donald got disgusted and left after Ginger and Calliope stole his credit card once too often, and two white druggie-looking sisters moved into his room and whenever I pass them in the hall they give me that eerie look that junkies give you before they get up the nerve to hit you up for money. This afternoon, I saw the two of them hanging out in the hall with the three other charming newcomers, probably plotting with them how to rip people off. They ignored me until I passed and then I know they were looking at me.
The place has gotten filthy. Russell, the manager, used to keep it spotless, but about a month ago Gerald fired him because (according to Russell) he spurned Gerald’s advances and Gerald got huffy and said, “Don’t come back tomorrow.” So now the carpeted floors are filthy and littered with cigarette butts and the kitchen is solid grease and the living room smells like a zoo and, in fact, the whole place smells like a zoo except for my place which I deodorize with plug-in devices that are probably giving me cancer.
Tommy wanted to visit and I put him off because it has turned into the flophouse that he warned me about and I can’t have him come here and see it. I don’t want to have my girlfriends over here anymore, although Bette has been here and seems amused by the whole scene. I’m afraid to tell Kimba what’s been happening because she’s been acting distant since Terri called and I’m afraid she’ll say she won’t ever come over here again.
Thank God for Johnny and Guillermo. They’re still my buddies, and they give me comfort. They hang around with thugs too, but their thuggish Latino buddies are benign compared to the two thugs who moved in here, who have that dangerous look. And the worst thing is that Jerome has become their guru. The thugs and the crackhead go into his room and gather around him while he watches TV and feeds them that slop from Yum’s. I don’t understand Jerome. He may be a sociopath, but he’s also a very bright man. What does he see in them?
Now I’m a monster in the lesbian community because I took Dr. Bobb’s advice and wrote another piece for the City Rag. It was a funny essay about the play party Terri and I attended last summer, but a lot of lesbos around here don’t appreciate my humor.
Without using any identifying information, I wrote about the innocuous “dominatrix” squirting fluid up someone’s pussy, and the whipping scene with the bored-looking women, and the anxious guests wandering around in their leather and cop uniforms and the absence of any kind of rebellious mood. I concluded by saying it was a “sorry day” when the S&M contingent of the lesbian community threw a party that had all the electricity of a junior high school dance.
It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but apparently nobody got it because the following week the paper was full of letters from dykes all over town, spewing vitriol. If you ask me, the letters confirmed my underlying point—that lesbians around here are terrified of appearing too wild or rebellious and prefer to blend into the mainstream. “For Ms. Kane to imply that this sorry carnival represents our community is outrageous,” wrote an officer of the largest national gay advocacy group in the nation. (I never implied any such thing.) “Sadomasochism is not a custom in our community,” wrote another goody-two-shoes. “It is an aberration.” Another woman wrote that the women were acting out abuse traumas of their childhoods and for me to be ridiculing them was “true sadism.” God. Don’t they have a sense of humor around here?
To make things worse, I’ve gotten little support on the home front. Bette loved my essay and Nicky and Jerome chortled over it, but that was about it. Kimba didn’t even bother to call me, and after I called her and asked her what she thought she said she liked my piece but then she abruptly changed the subject, telling me about plans she made with people I didn’t even know. Worst of all, yesterday I got this repugnant e-mail from Terri which said, “Good writing, but I’m not sure it was appropriate for City Rag. The Washington Blade, perhaps?” I wanted to kill her. The whole point was to make the straight world aware of us, not write something about lesbians and hide it away in the damn gay Blade. Since Terri was with me at that ridiculous party, I was hoping that she would be amused by my piece, but no! She just had to diss it. I hate her with a boiling passion.
I know I’m taking out on Terri all my hurt over those angry letters and Kimba acting so strange. But I can’t help it. I’m back to obsessing about her, but now it’s in a rageful way. I wish she never sent me that e-mail, but if she didn’t say anything I would be just as furious. Everyone’s sick of hearing it. Bette said, “You knew what she was going to say,” and Tommy said I’ve gone back to being a Sputnik circling around her and my sister Queen said I should forget about Terri and concentrate on Kimba, and when I told her Kimba wasn’t being very nice she said, “There’s probably a good reason for it.”
The most disconcerting reprimand was from Nicky, who said if I couldn’t stop carrying on about Terri Dr. Bobb would employ some kind of de-programming technique on me that the two of them discussed. As it turns out, Nicky is seeing Dr. Bobb in therapy, in spite of their unnatural attraction to each other. I’m sure they just sit around and discuss how fucked up everyone is with the exception of them. So now they’re plotting to inflict some kind of radical treatment on me just because I’m justifiably upset over no one appreciating my essay.
Maybe I
should agree to the treatment. I could end up having the sublime S&M experience that creepy party failed to provide. On second thought, with Dr. Bobb at the controls it could get out of hand. What if he turns me into a salmon or a hamster? I’d better be careful about what I say around Nicky for a while.
Dee broke up with Terri and asked me out, which is wonderful because now I can get back at Missy for trying to destroy me. Also it will be a good distraction from being upset over Kimba, who never even calls anymore and acts like an insolent teenager when I call her. I’m afraid to ask her what’s going on because her response might not be nice and I’m too vulnerable to hear it right now. I hate to say it, but men are a lot easier to deal with than women. You always know what they’re thinking.
When the phone rang yesterday, a silky voice said, “Joanna?” and when I confirmed my identity, Dee didn’t even say who it was, which I thought was cute, that she assumed I knew. She just said, “I loved your piece in the City Rag.” She said she laughed all the way through it, and that she agrees with me that our community could use a little more flavor. She said other places she’d lived, like Colorado and California, had real kick-ass lesbians that strutted around in ragged denim vests and spikey hair. “I’m talking about women in their fifties and sixties,” she said. “I never went to their sex parties, but I’m sure they were spicier than this one.” I mentioned that Terri had been with me at the party and she knew this, and then she said that she and Terri had broken up.
Dee said she got sick of Terri’s selfishness. The turning point was their “romantic getaway” in the Shenandoah Valley. She said Terri was sullen and uncooperative and ruined the whole weekend. I said I’d talked to Terri and mentioned the barbecue shack that Dee wanted to drag her to even though she’s a vegetarian, and Dee laughed her musical laugh and she, “What a jerk! Did she tell you the reason I wanted to take her there?” She said the place was known for its mock barbecue, and was a favorite of vegetarians, and Dee had been talking to Terri about it for weeks and was planning the whole trip around it, and then Terri refused to go just to be spiteful. That was so typical of Terri I laughed and laughed. I assumed this was after Terri had become disenchanted with Dee, because when she’s wooing someone she’s all “gentlemanly,” but after she becomes disenchanted she’s like Idi Amin.
Dee asked me if I wanted to go with her to La Rouche, a French bistro in Georgetown. She said she knew my birthday is coming up (how did she know?) and dinner was on her. Of course I said yes. I’ve always liked Dee, ever since I first laid eyes on her at her potluck. I think she’s very cool.
Dee and I had a fantastic time last night at La Rouche. And today I’m in such a foul mood I don’t know what to do. All I write in this diary is how I’m depressed or nervous or crazy and sometimes I’m inappropriately euphoric. I should just get over myself. There are children starving in Africa. But I can’t help it if I’m depressed after having a perfect evening with a beautiful woman. I mean, too bad.
Dee and I shared a bottle of wine and had French bistro food and talked about everything. She wore a simple brown dress, which directed my attention to her lovely face and sparkling eyes and newly braided hair, which was flecked with gold. I told her I was ashamed of my behavior on our first date, the way I blithered on about Terri. We laughed about my burying our pack of cigarettes under that bench, and Dee said, “We have to dig them up! Do you remember where they are?”
We talked about her growing up a middle-class African-American in DC. Dee said sometimes the black ladies, her mother and aunts and church-going neighbors, got on her nerves. She said they would look at a gay person, male or female, and shake their heads and go, “Mm-mm-mm.” I asked if they called lesbians “bull-daggers,” and Dee laughed her head off. She said, “There’s a story about that word. I never even heard it until I grew up and read some books. When I came out to my mom, she was pretty good about it, but once I got mad at her because she said she didn’t want my girlfriend over at Christmas. She said, ‘Honey bunch, we really want it to be just the family.’ And I said, ‘Oh, you’re ashamed that Granny and Aunt Doris will see that your daughter is a bull-dagger!’ Joanna, I’d never seen my mother so shocked. Her eyes bulged and she drew herself up and said, ‘No daughter of mine will ever use that word. Ever! Do you understand me?’ I was afraid she was going to slap me, which she’d only done twice in my life. I said, ‘All right, all right!’ And she went into the kitchen and refused to speak to me the whole afternoon.”
“What was she so upset about?” I asked.
“She was upset that I had used a word used by low-class people. Like people in the ghetto. My mom hates people from the ghetto. She donates clothes to them and goes over to Southeast and reads to preschool children, but she hates that they drag us down. She denies it, but it’s obvious. Like the girlfriend I wanted to bring over for Christmas? She was a smart-ass street girl. And she loved my mom and would bring her the nicest gifts when we went there for dinner, and my mom was as chilly to her as a gray day in November.”
“Well, that’s probably why she didn’t want to have her for Christmas,” I said.
“That and because she hadn’t come to terms with my being a bull-dagger,” Dee said, and we cracked up. I told Dee that my mom couldn’t stand anyone who didn’t speak proper English. “Both of my parents had Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents and they learned English in school,” I said. “Proper English. If any one of us dated someone who said, ‘She refused to go to the movies with him and I,’ my mom wouldn’t even want that person in the house. If someone said, ‘She don’t wanna go to the movies with him and I,’ that would be the end. She would act as though the person was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. And now her own kids use sloppy language and it drives her nuts. Like my brother Robbie will say, ‘Ah, he don’t know what he’s doing,” and my mom will said “He doesn’t know what he’s doing! My children should always speak properly!’ If I say, ‘That’s really fucked up,’ my mom will say, ‘A writer should be able to choose her words more carefully.’”
“I would never say ‘That’s really fucked up’ to my mom,” Dee said.
“That’s because your mom is black,” I said. “You don’t fuck around with black moms because they don’t put up with any back-talk you hear me?”
“Oh, my mom is a potato head,” Dee said irreverently because she was smashed on wine, and we laughed until I almost peed.
Dee insisted on paying for my dinner. She had the foresight to tell me not to drive, since we were going to drink, and we shared a cab home. We got to her apartment on 17th Street and then I kissed her good-night, a gentle, closed-mouthed kiss, and she smiled and got out of the cab and I went home. It was a perfect date.
And today, as I said before, I’m depressed as hell. There’s something terribly wrong with me. The only thing I’m clear about concerning my date with Dee is that it won’t be a good idea to tell Kimba. I don’t think she would be very supportive.
Yesterday the most extraordinary thing happened. I had decided to get a tattoo, which I had wanted ever since Kimba inked a fake “Live Free or Die” tattoo on my arm. I was walking to Tattoo Joe’s on Connecticut and saw Cherry Hill gazing into an upscale boutique with a black woman with short, salt-and-pepper hair. Remembering my last sad meeting with Cherry, I was going to just keep walking, but she saw me and said, “Joanna!” in a voice more appropriate if I had been two blocks away. I stopped, and she smiled at me, and I noticed that she looked beautiful in a purple wool coat and some kicky multicolored boots. The next thing I noticed was that her companion was Judge Louise Holmes.
Judge Holmes said, “Isn’t that Joanna Kane?” Cherry replied, “Yes, Louise. Staying out of trouble, I hope.”
The judge laughed. “Well, I haven’t seen her in my courtroom lately, so that’s a good sign.”
I was blown away. I knew Cherry was friends with the judge, but to see them together gave me a peculiar thrill. I had had very intense experiences with both of them, and there they
were, together. “Well, hello there, ladies,” I said. “Judge Holmes, it’s a pleasure to see you again, under less trying circumstances. And you’ll be pleased to know I’ve been managing to stay out of court. But not out of trouble.” I laughed.
Judge Holmes laughed too. “Joanna, I wouldn’t expect you to stay out of any trouble,” she said. “I just hope you’re not doing anything too crazy, like lying on the ground eating sandwiches and cursing out police officers.” I was practically coming in my pants that the judge remembered me and my badness so clearly. I was more turned on by that than by remembering my kinky tryst with Cherry Hill. Judge Holmes turned to Cherry and said, “Sweetie, why don’t you and Joanna walk me to the Metro? I’ve got to be in court by four.” I thought it was cute that the judge would call her friend “sweetie.”
“Come on, Joanna!” Cherry ordered, as though I was their four-year-old daughter, and we walked to the Metro. Then, to my astonishment, Cherry and Judge Louse Holmes kissed each other goodbye. On the mouth. Looking into each other’s eyes. I almost fell over onto the street. Then the judge stepped onto the long escalator. We watched her descend, and she turned around and gave us a coy little wave.
Cherry and I were standing there and I could barely collect myself. I stuttered that I had been on my way to get a tattoo and she said, “Fantastic! I’ll go with you!” This was fine with me because I needed some explanation for what I’d just witnessed. Also I realized I could use some company during the ordeal of getting my first tattoo.
The only artist at Tattoo Joe’s was busy with a client, and no one else was waiting, so Cherry and I walked around the waiting area, looking at the samples covering the walls. Finally I picked out an eagle, since I am a freedom-loving girl and also because I don’t want these creepy Republicans to lay claim to our national symbols. (The eagle is softened by pastels, so it looks kind of psychedelic, and I love it.) After I made my selection, we sat down and Cherry said, “So tell me everything that’s been going on with you, Joanna.” I said, “No, Cherry. You tell me what’s been going on with you.”